Elegy
Now that the sun has abandoned you along with this world and the other stars, it’s time to empty your backpack of all the tools you learned to use to forge a life you could live with. Now you have nothing left, no money, no keys, only your curiosity about what you could never know at all. Your passions and your discoveries have not succeeded in putting you on any paved road. Now you are nothing but the disease that has come for you and overcome you, nothing but a dream that dreams of itself, nothing but love, disembodied and throwing itself into nothingness in all directions. Now you are only the distance between what you were and what you wanted, and yet you leave traces of your memories and hopes, your yearning and fears, as the rest of us go on, sweating and spitting at the great gaping nothingness closing in on us.
5 thoughts on "Elegy"
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Wow! I hardly know what to say about this, Tom, except that it’s exceptionally well written. It jolts me.
My best friend from childhood died last Tuesday. This is my second attempt at an elegy since then. I’m not ready to address the specifics of his life, which were mostly tragic.
Ah! I understand. And how will those “specifics of his life” impact this poem? I wonder, do I intellectualize grief to keep it at a distance until I can allow it to come closer? Yeah, I think I do that!
Thank you!
I’m sorry for your loss, Tom. You honor him.
“A dream that dreams of itself…” Wow.